With an ever-increasing number of computing devices attaching to networks, each with an ever-increasing data storage capacity, more and more data is being created and consumed at the edge of the network. While the direct network connectivity of these computing devices has been able to keep up from a bandwidth-requirement perspective based on the needs of a single computing device connection, shared connections, such as those within a home office or remote branch office of a company, have not.
In most corporate environments, data is critical to the needs of the organization, and historically there would a single computing device at the edge of the corporate network that was shared between multiple users. There was little, if any, local data storage and the network connectivity between these shared devices and the server-based systems to which they connected were more than adequate. Today's, and, increasingly, tomorrow's environment has totally flipped this model of computing on its head. Instead of a single computing device that is shared between multiple people, each person regularly has multiple personal computing devices each with its own large capacity of local data storage. In this new model, data is more often created and consumed at the edge of the network, with minimal operational oversight or control by centralized IT administration.